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• What to "CRM" in San Francisco? CRM Highlights for OpenWorld '12

  - by Richard Lefebvre

  There is plenty to SEE for CRM during OpenWorld in San Francisco, September 30 - October 4! Here are some of the sessions in the CRM Track that you might want to consider attending for products you currently own or might consider for the future. I think you'll agree, there is quite a bit of investment going on across Oracle CRM. Please use OpenWorld Schedule Builder or check the OpenWorld Content Catalog for all of the session details and any time or location changes. Tip: Pre-enrolled session registrants via Schedule Builder are allowed into the session rooms before anyone else, so Schedule Builder will guarantee you a seat. Many of the sessions below will likely be at capacity. General Session: Oracle Fusion CRM—Improving Sales Effectiveness, Efficiency, and Ease of Use (Session ID: GEN9674) - Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM. Anthony Lye, Senior VP, Oracle leads this general session focused on Oracle Fusion CRM. Oracle Fusion CRM optimizes territories, combines quota management and incentive compensation, integrates sales and marketing, and cleanses and enriches data—all within a single application platform. Oracle Fusion can be configured, changed, and extended at runtime by end users, business managers, IT, and developers. Oracle Fusion CRM can be used from the Web, from a smartphone, from Microsoft Outlook, or from an iPad. Deloitte, sponsor of the CRM Track, will also present key concepts on CRM implementations. Oracle Fusion Customer Relationship Management: Overview/Strategy/Customer Experiences/Roadmap (CON9407) - Oct 1, 3:15PM - 4:15PM. In this session, learn how Oracle Fusion CRM enables companies to create better sales plans, generate more quality leads, and achieve higher win rates and find out why customers are adopting Oracle Fusion CRM. Gain a deeper understanding of the unique capabilities only Oracle Fusion CRM provides, and learn how Oracle’s commitment to CRM innovation is driving a wide range of future enhancements. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service Vision and Roadmap (CON9764) - Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM. Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service combines Web, social, and contact center experiences for a unified, cross-channel service solution in the cloud, enabling organizations to increase sales and adoption, build trust, strengthen relationships, and reduce costs and effort. Come to this session to hear from Oracle experts about where the product is going and how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value to its customers. Siebel CRM Overview, Strategy, and Roadmap (CON9700) - Oct 1, 12:15PM - 1:15PM. The world’s most complete CRM solution, Oracle’s Siebel CRM helps organizations differentiate their businesses. Come to this session to learn about the Siebel product roadmap and how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value for its customers on this platform. Additionally, the session covers how Siebel customers can leverage many Oracle assets such as Oracle WebCenter Sites; InQuira, RightNow, and ATG/Endeca applications, and Oracle Policy Automation in conjunction with their current Siebel investments. Oracle Fusion Social CRM Strategy and Roadmap: Future of Collaboration and Social Engagement (CON9750) - Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM. Social is changing the customer experience! Come find out how Oracle can help you know your customers better, encourage brand affinity, and improve collaboration within your ecosystem. This session reviews Oracle’s social media solution and shows how you can discover hidden insights buried in your enterprise and social data. Also learn how Oracle Social Network revolutionizes how enterprise users work, collaborate, and share to achieve successful outcomes. Oracle CRM On Demand Strategy and Roadmap (CON9727) - Oct 1, 10:45AM - 11:45AM. Oracle CRM On Demand is a powerful cloud-based customer relationship management solution. Come to this session to learn directly from Oracle experts about future product plans and hear how Oracle is committed to accelerating the pace of innovation and value to its customers. Knowledge Management Roadmap and Strategy (CON9776) - Oct 1, 12:15PM - 1:15PM. Learn how to harness the knowledge created as a natural byproduct of day-to-day interactions to lower costs and improve customer experience by delivering the right answer at the right time across channels. This session includes an overview of Oracle’s product roadmap and vision for knowledge management for both the Oracle RightNow and Oracle Knowledge (formerly InQuira) product families. Oracle Policy Automation Roadmap: Supercharging the Customer Experience (CON9655) - Oct 1, 12:15PM - 1:15PM. Oracle Policy Automation delivers rapid customer value by streamlining the capture, analysis, and deployment of policies across every facet of the customer experience. This session discusses recent Oracle Policy Automation enhancements for policy analytics; the latest Oracle Policy Automation Connector for Siebel; and planned new capabilities, including availability with the Oracle RightNow product line. There is much more, so stay tuned for more highlights or check out the Content Catalog and search for your areas of interest. 

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• Customer Perspectives: Oracle Data Integrator

  - by Julien Testut

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE The Data Integration Product Management team will be hosting a customer panel session dedicated to Oracle Data Integrator at Oracle OpenWorld. I will have the pleasure to present this session with three of our customers: Paychex, Ross Stores and Turkcell. In this session, you will hear how Paychex, Ross Stores and Turkcell utilize Oracle Data Integrator to meet their IT and business needs. Our customers will be able to share with you how they use ODI in their environments, best practices, lessons learned and benefits of implementing Oracle Data Integrator. If you're interested in hearing more about how our customers use Oracle Data Integrator then I recommend attending this session: Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Customer Perspectives: Oracle Data Integrator Wednesday October, 3rd, 1:15PM - 2:15PM Marriott Marquis – Golden Gate C3 v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} The Data Integration track at OpenWorld covers variety of topics and speakers. In addition to product management of Oracle GoldenGate, Oracle Data Integrator, and Enteprise Data Quality presenting product updates and roadmap, we have several customer panels and stand-alone sessions featuring select customers such as St. Jude Medical, Raymond James, Aderas, Turkcell, Paychex, Comcast, Ticketmaster, Bank of America and more. You can see an overview of Data Integration sessions here.  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} If you are not able to attend OpenWorld, please check out our latest resources for Data Integration and Oracle GoldenGate. In the coming weeks you will see more blogs about our products’ new capabilities and what to expect at OpenWorld. We hope to see you at OpenWorld and stay in touch via our future blogs. v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• State of the (Commerce) Union: What the healthcare.gov hiccups teach us about the commerce customer experience

  - by Katrina Gosek

  Guest Post by Brenna Johnson, Oracle Commerce Product A lot has been said about the healthcare.gov debacle in the last week. Regardless of your feelings about the Affordable Care Act, there’s a hidden issue in this story that most of the American people don’t understand: delivering a great commerce customer experience (CX) is hard. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The reality of the government’s issues getting the healthcare site up and running smooth is something we in the online commerce community know too well.  If there’s one thing the botched launch of the site has taught us, it’s that regardless of the size of your budget or the power of an executive with a high-profile project, some of the biggest initiatives with the most attention (and the most at stake) don’t go as planned. It may even give you a moment of solace – we have the same issues! But why?  Organizations engage too many separate vendors with different technologies, running sections or pieces of a site to get live. When things go wrong, it takes time to identify the problem – and who or what is at the center of it. Unfortunately, this is a brittle way of setting up a site, making it susceptible to breaks, bugs, and scaling issues. But, it’s the reality of running a site with legacy technology constraints in today’s demanding, customer-centric market. This approach also means there’s also a lot of cooks in lots of different kitchens. You’ve got development and IT, the business and the marketing team, an external Systems Integrator to bring it all together, a digital agency or consultant, QA, product experts, 3rd party suppliers, and the list goes on. To complicate things, different business units are held responsible for different pieces of the site and managing different technologies. And again – due to legacy organizational structure and processes, this is all accepted as the normal State of the Union. Digital commerce has been commonplace for 15 years. Yet, getting a site live, maintained and performing requires orchestrating a cast of thousands (or at least, dozens), big dollars, and some finger-crossing. But it shouldn’t. The great thing about the advent of mobile commerce and the continued maturity of online commerce is that it’s forced organizations to think from the outside, in. Consumers – whether they’re shopping for shoes or a new healthcare plan – don’t care about what technology issues or processes you have behind the scenes. They just want it to work.  They want their experience to be easy, fast, and tailored to them and their needs – whatever they are. This doesn’t sound like a tall order to the American consumer – especially since they interact with sites that do work smoothly.  But the reality is that it takes scores of people, teams, check-ins, late nights, testing, and some good luck to get sites to run, and even more so at Black Friday (or October 1st) traffic levels.  The last thing on a customer’s mind is making excuses for why they can’t buy a product – just get it to work. So what is the government doing? My guess is working day and night to get the site performing  - and having to throw big money at the problem. In the meantime they’re sending frustrated online users to the call center, or even a location where a trained “navigator” can help them in-person to complete their selection. Sounds a lot like multichannel commerce (where broken communication between siloed touchpoints will only frustrate the consumer more). One thing we’ve learned is that consumers spend their time and money with brands they know and trust. When sites are easy to use and adapt to their needs, they tend to spend more, come back, and even become long-time loyalists. Achieving this may require moving internal mountains, but there’s too much at stake to ignore the sea change in how organizations are thinking about their customer. If the thought of re-thinking your internal teams, technologies, and processes sounds like a headache, think about the pain associated with losing valuable customers – and dollars. Regardless if you’re in B2B or B2C, it’s guaranteed that your competitors are making CX a priority. Those early to the game who have made CX a priority have already begun to outpace their competition. So as you’re planning for 2014, look to the news this week. Make sure the customer experience is a focus at your organization. Expectations are at record highs. Map your customer’s journey, and think from the outside, in. How easy is it for your customers to do business with you? If they interact with many touchpoints across your organization, are the call center, website, mobile environment, or brick and mortar location in sync? Do you have the technology in place to achieve this? It’s time to give the people what they want!

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• How can I troubleshoot an APPCRASH in Internet Explorer?

  - by Schnapple

  I'm writing an ActiveX control using the firebreath framework (hi taxilian!) and while it technically works, I'm running into a weird issue that appears to be unique to me. I've followed the instructions to create a simple plugin and then I ran it in Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7 x64 (firebreath sets up a test page for the control). But as soon as I try to test it (clicking on a link that fires off JavaScript to interact with the control), IE crashes. Hard. "Internet Explorer has stopped working" style. If I try the control in Firefox (the resulting registered DLL can also be called as a Firefox plugin using a MIME type), it works fine. If I try it on my XP box, it works fine. I emailed the DLL and the testing page to a coworker in the next cube who is like me also running Windows 7 x64 and it works for him just fine as well, so it's not something unique to Windows 7 or x64. When it crashes I get this message: Problem signature: Problem Event Name: APPCRASH Application Name: iexplore.exe Application Version: 8.0.7600.16385 Application Timestamp: 4a5bc69e Fault Module Name: RPCRT4.dll Fault Module Version: 6.1.7600.16385 Fault Module Timestamp: 4a5bdb3b Exception Code: c0000005 Exception Offset: 000220b1 OS Version: 6.1.7600.2.0.0.256.1 Locale ID: 1033 Additional Information 1: 0a9e Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789 Additional Information 3: 0a9e Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789 Which tells me nothing extremely useful. I can have it attach to a debugger but it just tells me a long list of DLL's, none of which are the ActiveX control in question. It's almost like it's not even getting there. I did a sfc /scannow yesterday to see if anything on my system is corrupt and nothing came up as wrong. I tried various different security levels in IE, but nothing seems to have any effect. As this is a development machine there has been all matter of crap installed on it, so I figure it's bound to be something I've installed since October (when Win7 was released) but I cannot figure out what it is. I presume the information it's giving me when I attach to Visual Studio is useful somehow but I don't know how to interpret it. Admittedly I'm mainly a C#/.NET developer who's a bit out of his element with C/C++ and troubleshooting native code, but does anyone have any advice on how to proceed on figuring out why this very simple ActiveX control crashes IE on my machine and nowhere else?

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• Jquery getJSON populate select menu question...

  - by Scott

  I am populating a select menu with getJSON. I am wondering if there's a way that I can use jQuery's .each function to bring in these values? Surely there must be an easier way to accomplish this...maybe? PHP file: <?php $queryMonth = "SELECT monthID, month FROM months"; $result = $db->query($queryMonth); while($rowMonth = $db->fetch_assoc($result)) : $data[] = $rowMonth; endwhile; echo json_encode($data); ?> The jQuery: $.getJSON('selectMenus.php', function(data){ $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[0].monthID + ">" + data[0].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[1].monthID + ">" + data[1].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[2].monthID + ">" + data[2].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[3].monthID + ">" + data[3].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[4].monthID + ">" + data[4].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[5].monthID + ">" + data[5].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[6].monthID + ">" + data[6].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[7].monthID + ">" + data[7].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[8].monthID + ">" + data[8].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[9].monthID + ">" + data[9].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[10].monthID + ">" + data[10].month + "</option>"); $("select.month").append("<option value=" + data[11].monthID + ">" + data[11].month + "</option>"); }); my json output looks like this: [{"monthID":"1","month":"January"},{"monthID":"2","month":"February"},{"monthID":"3","month":"March"},{"monthID":"4","month":"April"},{"monthID":"5","month":"May"},{"monthID":"6","month":"June"},{"monthID":"7","month":"July"},{"monthID":"8","month":"August"},{"monthID":"9","month":"Septemeber"},{"monthID":"10","month":"October"},{"monthID":"11","month":"November"},{"monthID":"12","month":"December"}]

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• Evaluating points in time by months, but without referencing years in Rails

  - by MikeH

  FYI, There is some overlap in the initial description of this question with a question I asked yesterday, but the question is different. My app has users who have seasonal products. When a user selects a product, we allow him to also select the product's season. We accomplish this by letting him select a start date and an end date for each product. We're using date_select to generate two sets of drop-downs: one for the start date and one for the end date. Including years doesn't make sense for our model. So we're using the option: discard_year => true When you use discard_year => true, Rails sets a year in the database, it just doesn't appear in the views. Rails sets all the years to either 0001 or 0002 in our app. Yes, we could make it 2009 and 2010 or any other pair. But the point is that we want the months and days to function independent of a particular year. If we used 2009 and 2010, then those dates would be wrong next year because we don't expect these records to be updated every year. My problem is that we need to dynamically evaluate the availability of products based on their relationship to the current month. For example, assume it's March 15. Regardless of the year, I need a method that can tell me that a product available from October to January is not available right now. If we were using actual years, this would be pretty easy. For example, in the products model, I can do this: def is_available? (season_start.past? && season_end.future?) end I can also evaluate a start_date and an end_date against current_date However, in setup I've described above where we have arbitrary years that only make sense relative to each other, these methods don't work. For example, is_available? would return false for all my products because their end date is in the year 0001 or 0002. What I need is a method just like the ones I used as examples above, except that they evaluate against current_month instead of current_date, and past? and future months instead of years. I have no idea how to do this or whether Rails has any built in functionality that could help. I've gone through all the date and time methods/helpers in the API docs, but I'm not seeing anything equivalent to what I'm describing. Thanks.

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• Please , Explain these java code ..?

  - by soma

  I want understand these code before java lab exam especially methode import javax.swing.; import java.util.; import java.text.*; public class EnglishCalendar { public static String[] months = { "January" , "February" , "March", "April" , "May" , "June", "July" , "August" , "September", "October" , "November" , "December" }; public static int days[] = { 31, 28, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31, 31, 30, 31, 30, 31 }; private void showMonth(int m, int y) { int lead_spaces = 0; if (m < 0 || m > 11) { System.out.println("It should be 1 to 12"); } else { System.out.println(); System.out.println(" " + months[m] + " " + y); System.out.println(); GregorianCalendar cal = new GregorianCalendar(y, m, 0); System.out.println("Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa "); lead_spaces = cal.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK); int day_of_month = days[m]; if (cal.isLeapYear(cal.get(Calendar.YEAR)) && m == 1){ day_of_month++;} for (int i = 0; i < lead_spaces; i++) { System.out.print(" "); } for (int i = 1; i <= day_of_month; i++) { if (i < 10) System.out.print(" "); System.out.print(i); if ((lead_spaces + i) % 7 == 0) { System.out.println(); } else { System.out.print(" "); } } System.out.println(); } } private static void doSimpleDateFormat() { Calendar now = Calendar.getInstance(); SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("E yyyy.MM.dd 'at' hh:mm:ss a zzz"); System.out.print(" \n It is now : " + formatter.format(now.getTime())); System.out.println(); } public static void main(String[] args) { String mo = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Month"); String ye = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Year"); int mon = new Integer(mo).intValue(); int yea = new Integer(ye).intValue(); EnglishCalendar k = new EnglishCalendar(); k.showMonth(mon - 1 , yea); doSimpleDateFormat(); } }

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• VB.Net 2008 IDE hanging - MSVB7.dll eating 100% CPU when editing code

  - by Andrew Backer

  I am having a problem with msvb7.dll eating 50%+ cpu on my dual core system. This usually lasts 10-30 seconds or so, during which time the IDE is non-responsive. This occurs when I do pretty much anything in the text editor, and can be replicated by simply adding blank lines to a function, and then deleting them. Or pasting some code. Or... lotsa stuff. SP1 installed I had DevExpress' refactor/coderush, components, and codeit.right installed, but have removed all 3 of them. (I had installed the latest version of Refactor Pro! (9.3.4), perhaps the day before) I have tried a VS.NET Repair. There is a kb that referenced some cpu destroying with vb, but it was included in SP1 Also: The solution consists of ~30 VB projects and 2 C# projects 8 other developers aren't having any issues with this (or at least not the SAME issues, we all have em) Clean get from TFS was done Project builds properly, can can even debug. This doesn't seem to happen on really small solutions, but perhaps it does and it just goes away super quick. Any clues at all as to what might be causing this, or how to fix it? I REALLY don't want to lose another day uninstalling and reinstalling and patching and so on =) If that even fixes it. Here is the stack trace (process explorer) that I get from the threads window when the msvb7.dll is churning. --- title in process explorer [threads] tab for process -------- cpu:49.28% cswitch delta: 300 to 3500 startaddress: [msvb7.dll+0x4218c] msvb7.dll version: 9.0.30729.1 --- actual stack trace ------- ntkrnlpa.exe!KiUnexpectedInterrupt+0x121 ntkrnlpa.exe!ZwYieldExecution+0x1c56 ntkrnlpa.exe!KiDispatchInterrupt+0x72e NDIS.sys!NdisFreeToBlockPool+0x15e1 // shortened stack trace. all of these are from msvb7, msvb7.dll+0x46ce7 <- 0x2676a <- 0x2698e <- 0x38031 <- 0x2659f <- 0x26644 msvb7.dll+0x25f29 <- 0x2ac7a <- 0x27522 <- 0x274a0 <- 0x2b5ce <- 0x2b6e4 msvb7.dll+0x67d0a <- 0x68551 <- 0x6817b <- 0x681f0 <- 0x67c38 <- 0x65fa8 msvb7.dll+0x666c6 <- 0x6672c <- 0x6673d <- 0x6677c <- 0x667b4 <- 0x63c77 msvb7.dll+0x63e97 <- 0x42c3a <- 0x42bc1 <- 0x41bd7 kernel32.dll!GetModuleFileNameA+0x1b4 This is the list of stuff from "copy info" in help-about, shortened to a resonable length. Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 | Version 9.0.30729.1 SP Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition - ENU Service Pack 1 (KB945140) KB945140 Microsoft .NET Framework | Version 3.5 SP1 Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Microsoft Visual F# for Visual Studio 2008 Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Team Explorer | Version 9.0.30729.1 Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Tools for Office Microsoft Visual Web Developer 2008 Hotfix for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition - ENU KB944899, KB945282, KB946040, KB946308, KB946344, KB946581, KB947171 KB947173, KB947180, KB947540, KB947789, KB948127, KB946260, KB946458, KB948816 Microsoft Recipe Framework Package 8.0 Process Editor WIT Designer 1.4.0.0 Process Editor for Microsoft Visual Studio Team Foundation Server, Version 1.4.0.0 tangible T4 Editor 9.0 tangible T4 Text Template Editor - T4 Editor tangibleprojectsystem 1.0 Team Foundation Server Power Tools October 2008 SQL Prompt 4.0 (disabled)

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• MSCC: Scripting - Administrator's­ toolbox of magic...

  Finally, we made it to have our April meetup - in May. The most obvious explanation is the increased amount of open source and IT activities that either the MSCC, the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM), or the University of Mauritius Student's Computer Club is organising. It's absolutely incredible to see the recent hype of events here on the island. And I'm loving it! Unfortunately, we also had to deal with arranging for a location this time. It was kind of an odyssey as my requests (and phone calls) haven't been answered, even though I tried it several times - well, kind of disappointing and I have to look into that for future gatherings. In my opinion, it is essential that two parameters of a community meeting are fixed as early as possible: Location, and Date and time You can't just change one or both on the very last minute. Well, this time we had to do it due to unforeseen reasons, and I apologise to any MSCC member which couldn't make it to our April meetup. Okay, lesson learned but now back to the actual meetup report ... Shortly after the meeting I placed the following statement as my first impression: "Spontaneous and improvised :) No, seriously, Ish and Dan had well prepared presentations on shell scripting, mainly focused towards Bourne Again Shell (bash), and the pros and cons of scripting versus actually writing something in a decent programming language. I thought that I could cut myself out of the equation but the demand for information about PowerShell was higher than expected..." Well, it turned out that the interest in Windows PowerShell was high, as I even got a couple of questions on it via social media networks during the evening. I also like to mention that the number of attendees went back to what I would call a "standard" number of participation. This time there were 12 craftsmen, but again a good number of First Timers. Reactions of other attendees Here are some impressions and feedback from our participants: "Enjoyed the bash and powershell (linux / windows) presentations ..." -- Nadim on event comments "He [Daniel] also showed us some syntax loopholes in Bash that could leave someone with bad code." -- Ish on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting   Glad to see a couple of first time attendees, especially students from the university itself. Some details on the presentations MSCC: First time visit at the University of Mauritius - Phase II Engineering Tower, room 2.9 Gimme some love ... bash and other shells Ish gave a great introduction into shell scripting as he spoke about existing shell environments and a little bit about their history. Furthermore, he talked about various built-in commands, the use of coreutils, the ability to daisy-chain multiple commands using pipes, the importance of the standard I/O streams and their file descriptors in advanced scripting techniques. Combined with a couple of sample statements in the Linux terminal on Ubuntu 14.04 machine it was a solid presentation. Have a closer look at his slides - published on his blog on MSCC – Let's talk about Scripting. Oddities of scripting After the brief introduction into bash it was Daniel's turn to highlight a good number of oddities when working with shell scripts. First of all, it should be clear that scripting is not supposed for any kind of implementations in terms of software but simply to automate administrative procedures and to simplify routine jobs on a system. One of the cool oddities that he mentioned is that everything (!) in a shell is represented by strings; there are no other types like integer, float, date-time, etc. that you'd like to use in a full-fledged programming language. Let's have a look at his sample:  more to come... What's the output? As a conclusion, Daniel suggests that shell scripting should be limited but not restricted to automatic repetitive command stacks and batch jobs, startup wrapper for applications in order to set up the execution environment, and other not too sophisticated jobs. But as soon as it might involve a little bit more logic or you might rely on performance it's better to write an application in Ruby, Python, or Perl (among others of course). This is also enables the possibility to test your code properly. MSCC: Ish talking about Bourne Again Shell (bash) and shell scripting to automate regular tasks MSCC: Daniel gives an overview about the pros and cons of shell scripting versus programming MSCC: PowerShell as your scripting solution on Windows operating systems The path of the Enlightened is long ... and tough. Honestly, even though PowerShell was mentioned without any further details on the meetup's agenda, I didn't expect that there would be demand to give a presentation on Microsoft PowerShell after all. I already took this topic out of the announcement but the audience wanted to have some information. Okay, then let's see what I could do - improvised style. While my machine booted and got hooked up to the projector, I started to talk about the beginnings of PowerShell from back in 2006, and its predecessors MS DOS and Command Prompt. A throwback in history... always good for young people. As usual, Microsoft didn't get it at that time. Instead of listening to their client's needs and demands they ignored the feasibility to administrate Windows server farms without any UI tools. PowerShell is actually a result of this, and seeing that shell scripting is a common, reliable and fast way in an administrator's toolbox for decades, Microsoft had to adapt from their Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to a broader approach. It's not like shell scripting was something new; it is in daily use by alternative operating systems like AIX, HP UX, Solaris, and last but not least Linux. Most interestingly, Microsoft is very good at renovating existing architectures, and over the years PowerShell not only replaced their own combination of Command Prompt and Scripting Hosts (VBScript and CScript) but really turned into a challenging competitor on the market. The shell is easy to extend with cmdlets, and open to other Microsoft products like SQL Server, SharePoint, as well as Third-party software applications. Similar to MMC PowerShell also offers the ability to administer other machine remotely - only without a graphical user interface and therefore it's easier to automate and schedule regular tasks. Following is a sample of a PowerShell script file (extension .ps1): $strComputer = "." $colItems = get-wmiobject -class Win32_BIOS -namespace root\CIMV2 -comp $strComputer foreach ($objItem in $colItems) {write-host "BIOS Characteristics: " $objItem.BiosCharacteristicswrite-host "BIOS Version: " $objItem.BIOSVersionwrite-host "Build Number: " $objItem.BuildNumberwrite-host "Caption: " $objItem.Captionwrite-host "Code Set: " $objItem.CodeSetwrite-host "Current Language: " $objItem.CurrentLanguagewrite-host "Description: " $objItem.Descriptionwrite-host "Identification Code: " $objItem.IdentificationCodewrite-host "Installable Languages: " $objItem.InstallableLanguageswrite-host "Installation Date: " $objItem.InstallDatewrite-host "Language Edition: " $objItem.LanguageEditionwrite-host "List Of Languages: " $objItem.ListOfLanguageswrite-host "Manufacturer: " $objItem.Manufacturerwrite-host "Name: " $objItem.Namewrite-host "Other Target Operating System: " $objItem.OtherTargetOSwrite-host "Primary BIOS: " $objItem.PrimaryBIOSwrite-host "Release Date: " $objItem.ReleaseDatewrite-host "Serial Number: " $objItem.SerialNumberwrite-host "SMBIOS BIOS Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSBIOSVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Major Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMajorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Minor Version: " $objItem.SMBIOSMinorVersionwrite-host "SMBIOS Present: " $objItem.SMBIOSPresentwrite-host "Software Element ID: " $objItem.SoftwareElementIDwrite-host "Software Element State: " $objItem.SoftwareElementStatewrite-host "Status: " $objItem.Statuswrite-host "Target Operating System: " $objItem.TargetOperatingSystemwrite-host "Version: " $objItem.Versionwrite-host} Which gives you information about your BIOS and Windows OS. Then change the computer name to another one on your network (NetBIOS based) and run the script again. There lots of samples and tutorials at the Microsoft Script Center, and I would advise you to pay a visit over there if you are more interested in PowerShell. The Script Center provides the download links, too. Upcoming Events What are the upcoming events here in Mauritius? So far, we have the following ones (incomplete list as usual) in chronological order: Hacking Defence (14. May 2014) WebCup Maurice (7. & 8. June 2014) Developers Conference (TBA ~ July 2014) Linuxfest 2014 (TBA ~ November 2014) Hopefully, there will be more announcements during the next couple of weeks and months. If you know about any other event, like a bootcamp, a code challenge or hackathon here in Mauritius, please drop me a note in the comment section below this article. Thanks! My resume of the day Spontaneous and improvised :) The new location at the University of Mauritius turned out very well, there is plenty of space, and it could be a good choice for future meetings. Especially, having the ability to get more and more students into our IT community sounds like a great opportunity. Later during the day, I got some promising mails from Nadim regarding future sessions at the local branch of the Middlesex University. Well, we will see in the future... But for now this will be on hold until approximately October when students resume their regular studies. Anyway, it was a good experience at the university, and thanks again to the UoM Student's Computer Club that made the necessary arrangements for the MSCC!

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• Using SQL Execution Plans to discover the Swedish alphabet

  - by Rob Farley

  SQL Server is quite remarkable in a bunch of ways. In this post, I’m using the way that the Query Optimizer handles LIKE to keep it SARGable, the Execution Plans that result, Collations, and PowerShell to come up with the Swedish alphabet. SARGability is the ability to seek for items in an index according to a particular set of criteria. If you don’t have SARGability in play, you need to scan the whole index (or table if you don’t have an index). For example, I can find myself in the phonebook easily, because it’s sorted by LastName and I can find Farley in there by moving to the Fs, and so on. I can’t find everyone in my suburb easily, because the phonebook isn’t sorted that way. I can’t even find people who have six letters in their last name, because also the book is sorted by LastName, it’s not sorted by LEN(LastName). This is all stuff I’ve looked at before, including in the talk I gave at SQLBits in October 2010. If I try to find everyone who’s names start with F, I can do that using a query a bit like: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F'; Unfortunately, the Query Optimizer doesn’t realise that all the entries that satisfy LEFT(LastName,1) = 'F' will be together, and it has to scan the whole table to find them. But if I write: SELECT LastName FROM dbo.PhoneBook WHERE LastName LIKE 'F%'; then SQL is smart enough to understand this, and performs an Index Seek instead. To see why, I look further into the plan, in particular, the properties of the Index Seek operator. The ToolTip shows me what I’m after: You’ll see that it does a Seek to find any entries that are at least F, but not yet G. There’s an extra Predicate in there (a Residual Predicate if you like), which checks that each LastName is really LIKE F% – I suppose it doesn’t consider that the Seek Predicate is quite enough – but most of the benefit is seen by its working out the Seek Predicate, filtering to just the “at least F but not yet G” section of the data. This got me curious though, particularly about where the G comes from, and whether I could leverage it to create the Swedish alphabet. I know that in the Swedish language, there are three extra letters that appear at the end of the alphabet. One of them is ä that appears in the word Västerås. It turns out that Västerås is quite hard to find in an index when you’re looking it up in a Swedish map. I talked about this briefly in my five-minute talk on Collation from SQLPASS (the one which was slightly less than serious). So by looking at the plan, I can work out what the next letter is in the alphabet of the collation used by the column. In other words, if my alphabet were Swedish, I’d be able to tell what the next letter after F is – just in case it’s not G. It turns out it is… Yes, the Swedish letter after F is G. But I worked this out by using a copy of my PhoneBook table that used the Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI collation. I couldn’t find how the Query Optimizer calculates the G, and my friend Paul White (@SQL_Kiwi) tells me that it’s frustratingly internal to the QO. He’s particularly smart, even if he is from New Zealand. To investigate further, I decided to do some PowerShell, leveraging the Get-SqlPlan function that I blogged about recently (make sure you also have the SqlServerCmdletSnapin100 snap-in added). I started by indicating that I was going to use Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI as my collation of choice, and that I’d start whichever letter cam straight after the number 9. I figure that this is a cheat’s way of guessing the first letter of the alphabet (but it doesn’t actually work in Unicode – luckily I’m using varchar not nvarchar. Actually, there are a few aspects of this code that only work using ASCII, so apologies if you were wanting to apply it to Greek, Japanese, etc). I also initialised my $alphabet variable. $collation = 'Finnish_Swedish_CI_AI'; $firstletter = '9'; $alphabet = ''; Now I created the table for my test. A single field would do, and putting a Clustered Index on it would suffice for the Seeks. Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "create table dbo.collation_test (col varchar(10) collate $collation primary key);" Now I get into the looping. $c = $firstletter; $stillgoing = $true; while ($stillgoing) { I construct the query I want, seeking for entries which start with whatever $c has reached, and get the plan for it: $query = "select col from dbo.collation_test where col like '$($c)%';"; [xml] $pl = get-sqlplan $query "." "tempdb"; At this point, my $pl variable is a scary piece of XML, representing the execution plan. A bit of hunting through it showed me that the EndRange element contained what I was after, and that if it contained NULL, then I was done. $stillgoing = ($pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange -ne $null); Now I could grab the value out of it (which came with apostrophes that needed stripping), and append that to my $alphabet variable.   if ($stillgoing)   {  $c=$pl.ShowPlanXML.BatchSequence.Batch.Statements.StmtSimple.QueryPlan.RelOp.IndexScan.SeekPredicates.SeekPredicateNew.SeekKeys.EndRange.RangeExpressions.ScalarOperator.ScalarString.Replace("'","");     $alphabet += $c;   } Finally, finishing the loop, dropping the table, and showing my alphabet! } Invoke-Sqlcmd -server . -data tempdb -query "drop table dbo.collation_test;"; $alphabet; When I run all this, I see that the Swedish alphabet is ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVXYZÅÄÖ, which matches what I see at Wikipedia. Interesting to see that the letters on the end are still there, even with Case Insensitivity. Turns out they’re not just “letters with accents”, they’re letters in their own right. I’m sure you gave up reading long ago, and really aren’t that fazed about the idea of doing this using PowerShell. I chose PowerShell because I’d already come up with an easy way of grabbing the estimated plan for a query, and PowerShell does allow for easy navigation of XML. I find the most interesting aspect of this as the fact that the Query Optimizer uses the next letter of the alphabet to maintain the SARGability of LIKE. I’m hoping they do something similar for a whole bunch of operations. Oh, and the fact that you know how to find stuff in the IKEA catalogue. Footnote: If you are interested in whether this works in other languages, you might want to consider the following screenshot, which shows that in principle, it should work with Japanese. It might be a bit harder to run this in PowerShell though, as I’m not sure how it translates. In Hiragana, the Japanese alphabet starts ?, ?, ?, ?, ?, ...

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• Avoid the “Social Silo” - Learn Why and How

  - by Brian Dayton

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} I’m not going to spend any more real estate than needed on this—social media is big. Facebook hit the Billion user mark in October, that’s 1 out of every 7 humans on the planet. This past Summer (in the Northern hemisphere) Twitter passed the 400 Million Tweet/day mark. The list of social properties and data points goes on and on. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} With social your customer, prospect, or constituent has pervasive access—through mobile—to a global audience, the ability to influence friends, friends of friends, and even people they will never meet. They also have the unique opportunity to forge a deeper relationship with your business—telling you what they like, what they don’t like, how you can help, and what they’d like to see more of. Are you listening? Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} What’s the Bottom Line for Business? Businesses need to be where their customers are—on social properties. They need to be available and responsive in those channels—24x7x365. They need to engage and communicate in new ways—sometimes in less than 140 characters and with empathy, not a 1-way megaphone. Finally, businesses need to look at social as an extension of their existing business practices. Not as a silo’d communication channel limited to marketing. Social Can’t Be a Silo – Learn Why @ Oracle CloudWorld When a business is on social networks they represent the whole business. That’s how a customer, constituent, partner or potential candidate sees it. Those organizations that have moved on the opportunity to build closer relationships through social marketing have already made the first step. Social Selling, Service, eCommerce, and Recruiting are external-facing opportunities that leading organizations are moving on right now. This strategy, one of weaving social into and across your business processes—and leveraging social concepts and technologies for internal collaboration—is something you can learn about during an Oracle CloudWorld event in a city near you. You’ll hear and see social relationship management concepts, best-practices, and recommendations woven into topics, discussions, and demonstrations throughout the event—from Marketing and Sales to Service and Human Resources. Stay Tuned and Avoid Potholes By all indications social is here to stay but it’s moving fast and social business strategies are evolving rapidly. At Oracle CloudWorld you’ll also get the opportunity to learn how to avoid some of the potholes on the road to #socialbusiness. Stay tuned to this blog. In future posts I’ll cover some of those potholes including the challenges of Social@Scale and Parallel Processes. Jump-start your social business strategy or learn how to refine and expand what you’re doing already at Oracle CloudWorld. Want to learn more about what Oracle is doing in social? Check out www.oracle.com/social or, if you're looking for a quick read my co-worker, Pat Ma, has a great post on this blog summarizing some popular Social Relationship Management use cases.

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• Big Data Matters with ODI12c

  - by Madhu Nair

  contributed by Mike Eisterer On October 17th, 2013, Oracle announced the release of Oracle Data Integrator 12c (ODI12c).  This release signifies improvements to Oracle’s Data Integration portfolio of solutions, particularly Big Data integration. Why Big Data = Big Business Organizations are gaining greater insights and actionability through increased storage, processing and analytical benefits offered by Big Data solutions.  New technologies and frameworks like HDFS, NoSQL, Hive and MapReduce support these benefits now. As further data is collected, analytical requirements increase and the complexity of managing transformations and aggregations of data compounds and organizations are in need for scalable Data Integration solutions. ODI12c provides enterprise solutions for the movement, translation and transformation of information and data heterogeneously and in Big Data Environments through: The ability for existing ODI and SQL developers to leverage new Big Data technologies. A metadata focused approach for cataloging, defining and reusing Big Data technologies, mappings and process executions. Integration between many heterogeneous environments and technologies such as HDFS and Hive. Generation of Hive Query Language. Working with Big Data using Knowledge Modules  ODI12c provides developers with the ability to define sources and targets and visually develop mappings to effect the movement and transformation of data.  As the mappings are created, ODI12c leverages a rich library of prebuilt integrations, known as Knowledge Modules (KMs).  These KMs are contextual to the technologies and platforms to be integrated.  Steps and actions needed to manage the data integration are pre-built and configured within the KMs.  The Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop provides a series of KMs, specifically designed to integrate with Big Data Technologies.  The Big Data KMs include: Check Knowledge Module Reverse Engineer Knowledge Module Hive Transform Knowledge Module Hive Control Append Knowledge Module File to Hive (LOAD DATA) Knowledge Module File-Hive to Oracle (OLH-OSCH) Knowledge Module  Nothing to beat an Example: To demonstrate the use of the KMs which are part of the ODI Application Adapter for Hadoop, a mapping may be defined to move data between files and Hive targets.  The mapping is defined by dragging the source and target into the mapping, performing the attribute (column) mapping (see Figure 1) and then selecting the KM which will govern the process.  In this mapping example, movie data is being moved from an HDFS source into a Hive table.  Some of the attributes, such as “CUSTID to custid”, have been mapped over. Figure 1  Defining the Mapping Before the proper KM can be assigned to define the technology for the mapping, it needs to be added to the ODI project.  The Big Data KMs have been made available to the project through the KM import process.   Generally, this is done prior to defining the mapping. Figure 2  Importing the Big Data Knowledge Modules Following the import, the KMs are available in the Designer Navigator. v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Figure 3  The Project View in Designer, Showing Installed IKMs Once the KM is imported, it may be assigned to the mapping target.  This is done by selecting the Physical View of the mapping and examining the Properties of the Target.  In this case MOVIAPP_LOG_STAGE is the target of our mapping. Figure 4  Physical View of the Mapping and Assigning the Big Data Knowledge Module to the Target Alternative KMs may have been selected as well, providing flexibility and abstracting the logical mapping from the physical implementation.  Our mapping may be applied to other technologies as well. The mapping is now complete and is ready to run.  We will see more in a future blog about running a mapping to load Hive. To complete the quick ODI for Big Data Overview, let us take a closer look at what the IKM File to Hive is doing for us.  ODI provides differentiated capabilities by defining the process and steps which normally would have to be manually developed, tested and implemented into the KM.  As shown in figure 5, the KM is preparing the Hive session, managing the Hive tables, performing the initial load from HDFS and then performing the insert into Hive.  HDFS and Hive options are selected graphically, as shown in the properties in Figure 4. Figure 5  Process and Steps Managed by the KM What’s Next Big Data being the shape shifting business challenge it is is fast evolving into the deciding factor between market leaders and others. Now that an introduction to ODI and Big Data has been provided, look for additional blogs coming soon using the Knowledge Modules which make up the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop: Importing Big Data Metadata into ODI, Testing Data Stores and Loading Hive Targets Generating Transformations using Hive Query language Loading Oracle from Hadoop Sources For more information now, please visit the Oracle Data Integrator Application Adapter for Hadoop web site, http://www.oracle.com/us/products/middleware/data-integration/hadoop/overview/index.html Do not forget to tune in to the ODI12c Executive Launch webcast on the 12th to hear more about ODI12c and GG12c. Normal 0 false false false EN-US ZH-TW X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";}

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• Windows 8 Launch&ndash;Why OEM and Retailers Should STFU

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Microsoft has gotten a lot of flack for the Surface from OEM/hardware partners who create Windows-based devices and I’m sure, to an extent, retailers who normally stock and sell Windows-based devices. I mean we all know how this is supposed to work – Microsoft makes the OS, partners make the hardware, retailers sell the hardware. Now Microsoft is breaking the rules by not only offering their own hardware but selling them via online and through their Microsoft branded stores! The thought has been that Microsoft is trying to set a standard for the other hardware companies to reach for. Maybe. I hope, at some level, Microsoft may be covertly responding to frustrations associated with trusting the OEMs and Retailers to deliver on their part of the supply chain. I know as a consumer, I’m very frustrated with the Windows 8 launch. Aside from the Surface sales, there’s nothing happening at the retail level. Let me back up and explain. Over the weekend I visited a number of stores in hopes of trying out various Windows 8 devices. Out of three retailers (Staples, Best Buy, and Future Shop), not *one* met my expectations. Let me be honest with you Staples, I never really have high expectations from your computer department. If I need paper or pens, whatever, but computers – you’re not the top of my list for price or selection. Still, considering you flaunted Win 8 devices in your flyer I expected *something* – some sign of effort that you took the Windows 8 launch seriously. As I entered the 1910 Pembina Highway location in Winnipeg, there was nothing – no signage, no banners – nothing that would suggest Windows 8 had even launched. I made my way to the laptops. I had to play with each machine to determine which ones were running Windows 8. There wasn’t anything on the placards that made it obvious which were Windows 8 machines and which ones were Windows 7. Likewise, there was no easy way to identify the touch screen laptop (the HP model) from the others without physically touching the screen to verify. Horrible experience. In the same mall as the Staples I mentioned above, there’s a Future Shop. Surely they would be more on the ball. I walked in to the 1910 Pembina Highway location and immediately realized I would not get a better experience. Except for the sign by the front door mentioning Windows 8, there was *nothing* in the computer department pointing you to the Windows 8 devices. Like in Staples, the Win 8 laptops were mixed in with the Win 7 ones and there was nothing notable calling out which ones were running Win 8. I happened to hit up the St. James Street location today, thinking since its a busier store they must have more options. To their credit, they did have two staff members decked out in Windows 8 shirts and who were helping a customer understand Windows 8. But otherwise, there was nothing highlighting the Windows 8 devices and they were again mixed in with the rest of the Win 7 machines. Finally, we have the St. James Street Best Buy location here in Winnipeg. I’m sure Best Buy will have their act together. Nope, not even close. Same story as the others: minimal signage (there was a sign as you walked in with a link to this schedule of demo days), Windows 8 hardware mixed with the rest of the PC offerings, and no visible call-outs identifying which were Win 8 based. This meant that, like Future Shop and Staples, if you wanted to know which machine had Windows 8 you had to go and scrutinize each machine. Also, there was nothing identifying which ones were touch based and which were not. Just Another Day… To these retailers, it seemed that the Windows 8 launch was just another day, with another product to add to the showroom floor. Meanwhile, Apple has their dedicated areas *in all three stores*. It was dead simple to find where the Apple products were compared to the Windows 8 products. No wonder Microsoft is starting to push their own retail stores. No wonder Microsoft is trying to funnel orders through them instead of relying on these bloated retail big box stores who obviously can’t manage a product launch. It’s Not Just The Retailers… Remember when the Acer CEO, Founder, and President of Computer Global Operations all weighed in on how Microsoft releasing the Surface would have a “huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction”? Also remember the CEO stating “[making hardware] is not something you are good at so please think twice”? Well the launch day has come and gone, and so far Microsoft is the only one that delivered on having hardware available on the October 26th date. Oh sure, there are laptops running Windows 8 – but all in one desktop PCs? I’ve only seen one or two! And tablets are *non existent*, with some showing an early to late November availability on Best Buy’s website! So while the retailers could be doing more to make it easier to find Windows 8 devices, the manufacturers could help by *getting devices into stores*! That’s supposedly something that these companies are good at, according to the Acer CEO. So Here’s What the Retailers and Manufacturers Need To Do… Get Product Out The pivotal timeframe will be now to the end of November. We need to start seeing all these fantastic pieces of hardware ship – including the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro, the Acer Iconia, the Asus TAICHI 21, and the sexy Samsung Series 7 27” desktop. It’s not enough to see product announcements, we need to see actual devices. Make It Easy For Customers To Find Win8 Devices You want to make it easy to sell these things? Make it easy for people to find them! Have staff on hand that really know how these devices run and what can be done with them. Don’t just have a single demo day, have people who can demo it every day! Make It Easy to See the Features There’s touch screen desktops, touch screen laptops, tablets, non-touch laptops, etc. People need to easily find the features for each machine. If I’m looking for a touch-laptop, I shouldn’t need to sift through all the non-touch laptops to find them – at the least, I need to quickly be able to see which ones are touch. I feel silly even typing this because this should be retail 101 and I have no retail background (but I do have an extensive background as a customer). In Summary… Microsoft launching the Surface and selling them through their own channels isn’t slapping its OEM and retail partners in the face; its slapping them to wake the hell up and stop coasting through Windows launch events like they don’t matter. Unless I see some improvements from vendors and retailers in November, I may just hold onto my money for a Surface Pro even if I have to wait until early 2013. Your move OEM/Retailers. *Update – While my experience has been in Winnipeg, similar experiences have been voiced from colleagues in Calgary and Edmonton.

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• Unable to boot Ubuntu 13.10 (nVidia GTX 770m and Intel HD 4600)

  - by Raziel Gonzalez

  Ever since I bought this laptop I've been trying to install Ubuntu on it. It came with W8 preinstalled. Up to this point, I've been able to boot in UEFI mode with a black screen. I can tell it's trying to use the nVidia card (there's a led on the computer, depending on the color you can tell which GPU is using) and if I press crtl+alt+F1 I can go to console mode. Taking this advantage I tried to install bumblebee and after a successful install the led that indicates which GPU is being used change, indicating that it switched to the Intel HD 4600 graphics. After the installation I tried to initiate the graphic interface (startx) with no success. Xorg.0.log shows the error: [ 3706.779] X.Org X Server 1.14.3 Release Date: 2013-09-12 [ 3706.782] X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 [ 3706.783] Build Operating System: Linux 3.2.0-37-generic x86_64 Ubuntu [ 3706.783] Current Operating System: Linux ubuntu 3.11.0-12-generic #19-Ubuntu SMP Wed Oct 9 16:20:46 UTC 2013 x86_64 [ 3706.783] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/casper/vmlinuz.efi file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper nomodeset -- [ 3706.785] Build Date: 15 October 2013 09:23:37AM [ 3706.786] xorg-server 2:1.14.3-3ubuntu2 (For technical support please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support) [ 3706.786] Current version of pixman: 0.30.2 [ 3706.788] Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. [ 3706.788] Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. [ 3706.791] (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Sat Nov 2 12:28:52 2013 [ 3706.792] (==) Using system config directory "/usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d" [ 3706.792] (==) No Layout section. Using the first Screen section. [ 3706.792] (==) No screen section available. Using defaults. [ 3706.792] (**) |-->Screen "Default Screen Section" (0) [ 3706.792] (**) | |-->Monitor "<default monitor>" [ 3706.792] (==) No monitor specified for screen "Default Screen Section". Using a default monitor configuration. [ 3706.792] (==) Automatically adding devices [ 3706.792] (==) Automatically enabling devices [ 3706.792] (==) Automatically adding GPU devices [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi" does not exist. [ 3706.792] Entry deleted from font path. [ 3706.792] (==) FontPath set to: /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, built-ins [ 3706.792] (==) ModulePath set to "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/modules" [ 3706.792] (II) The server relies on udev to provide the list of input devices. If no devices become available, reconfigure udev or disable AutoAddDevices. [ 3706.792] (II) Loader magic: 0x7ff680918d20 [ 3706.792] (II) Module ABI versions: [ 3706.792] X.Org ANSI C Emulation: 0.4 [ 3706.792] X.Org Video Driver: 14.1 [ 3706.792] X.Org XInput driver : 19.1 [ 3706.792] X.Org Server Extension : 7.0 [ 3706.793] (--) PCI:*(0:0:2:0) 8086:0416:1462:10e8 rev 6, Mem @ 0xf7400000/4194304, 0xb0000000/268435456, I/O @ 0x0000f000/64 [ 3706.793] (II) Open ACPI successful (/var/run/acpid.socket) [ 3706.794] Initializing built-in extension Generic Event Extension [ 3706.795] Initializing built-in extension SHAPE [ 3706.796] Initializing built-in extension MIT-SHM [ 3706.797] Initializing built-in extension XInputExtension [ 3706.797] Initializing built-in extension XTEST [ 3706.798] Initializing built-in extension BIG-REQUESTS [ 3706.799] Initializing built-in extension SYNC [ 3706.799] Initializing built-in extension XKEYBOARD [ 3706.800] Initializing built-in extension XC-MISC [ 3706.801] Initializing built-in extension SECURITY [ 3706.802] Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA [ 3706.802] Initializing built-in extension XFIXES [ 3706.803] Initializing built-in extension RENDER [ 3706.804] Initializing built-in extension RANDR [ 3706.804] Initializing built-in extension COMPOSITE [ 3706.805] Initializing built-in extension DAMAGE [ 3706.806] Initializing built-in extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER [ 3706.806] Initializing built-in extension DOUBLE-BUFFER [ 3706.807] Initializing built-in extension RECORD [ 3706.807] Initializing built-in extension DPMS [ 3706.808] Initializing built-in extension X-Resource [ 3706.809] Initializing built-in extension XVideo [ 3706.809] Initializing built-in extension XVideo-MotionCompensation [ 3706.810] Initializing built-in extension SELinux [ 3706.811] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-VidModeExtension [ 3706.811] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-DGA [ 3706.812] Initializing built-in extension XFree86-DRI [ 3706.812] Initializing built-in extension DRI2 [ 3706.812] (II) "glx" will be loaded by default. [ 3706.812] (WW) "xmir" is not to be loaded by default. Skipping. [ 3706.812] (II) LoadModule: "dri2" [ 3706.812] (II) Module "dri2" already built-in [ 3706.812] (II) LoadModule: "glamoregl" [ 3706.813] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglamoregl.so [ 3706.813] (II) Module glamoregl: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.813] compiled for 1.14.2.901, module version = 0.5.1 [ 3706.813] ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4 [ 3706.813] (II) LoadModule: "glx" [ 3706.813] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so [ 3706.813] (II) Module glx: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.813] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 1.0.0 [ 3706.813] ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 7.0 [ 3706.813] (==) AIGLX enabled [ 3706.814] Loading extension GLX [ 3706.814] (==) Matched intel as autoconfigured driver 0 [ 3706.814] (==) Matched vesa as autoconfigured driver 1 [ 3706.814] (==) Matched modesetting as autoconfigured driver 2 [ 3706.814] (==) Matched fbdev as autoconfigured driver 3 [ 3706.814] (==) Assigned the driver to the xf86ConfigLayout [ 3706.814] (II) LoadModule: "intel" [ 3706.814] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/intel_drv.so [ 3706.814] (II) Module intel: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.814] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 2.99.904 [ 3706.814] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 3706.814] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.814] (II) LoadModule: "vesa" [ 3706.814] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/vesa_drv.so [ 3706.814] (II) Module vesa: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.814] compiled for 1.14.1, module version = 2.3.2 [ 3706.814] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 3706.814] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.814] (II) LoadModule: "modesetting" [ 3706.814] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/modesetting_drv.so [ 3706.814] (II) Module modesetting: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.814] compiled for 1.14.1, module version = 0.8.0 [ 3706.814] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 3706.814] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.814] (II) LoadModule: "fbdev" [ 3706.814] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/fbdev_drv.so [ 3706.815] (II) Module fbdev: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.815] compiled for 1.14.1, module version = 0.4.3 [ 3706.815] Module class: X.Org Video Driver [ 3706.815] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.815] (II) intel: Driver for Intel(R) Integrated Graphics Chipsets: i810, i810-dc100, i810e, i815, i830M, 845G, 854, 852GM/855GM, 865G, 915G, E7221 (i915), 915GM, 945G, 945GM, 945GME, Pineview GM, Pineview G, 965G, G35, 965Q, 946GZ, 965GM, 965GME/GLE, G33, Q35, Q33, GM45, 4 Series, G45/G43, Q45/Q43, G41, B43, HD Graphics, HD Graphics 2000, HD Graphics 3000, HD Graphics 2500, HD Graphics 4000, HD Graphics P4000, HD Graphics 4600, HD Graphics 5000, HD Graphics P4600/P4700, Iris(TM) Graphics 5100, HD Graphics 4400, HD Graphics 4200, Iris(TM) Pro Graphics 5200 [ 3706.815] (II) VESA: driver for VESA chipsets: vesa [ 3706.815] (II) modesetting: Driver for Modesetting Kernel Drivers: kms [ 3706.815] (II) FBDEV: driver for framebuffer: fbdev [ 3706.815] (--) using VT number 7 [ 3706.819] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for modesetting [ 3706.819] (EE) open /dev/dri/card0: No such file or directory [ 3706.819] (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fbdev [ 3706.819] (II) Loading sub module "fbdevhw" [ 3706.819] (II) LoadModule: "fbdevhw" [ 3706.819] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libfbdevhw.so [ 3706.819] (II) Module fbdevhw: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.819] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 0.0.2 [ 3706.819] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.819] (II) Loading sub module "vbe" [ 3706.819] (II) LoadModule: "vbe" [ 3706.819] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libvbe.so [ 3706.819] (II) Module vbe: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.819] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 1.1.0 [ 3706.819] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.819] (II) Loading sub module "int10" [ 3706.819] (II) LoadModule: "int10" [ 3706.819] (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libint10.so [ 3706.819] (II) Module int10: vendor="X.Org Foundation" [ 3706.819] compiled for 1.14.3, module version = 1.0.0 [ 3706.819] ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 14.1 [ 3706.819] (II) VESA(0): initializing int10 [ 3706.820] (EE) VESA(0): V_BIOS address 0x0 out of range [ 3706.820] (II) UnloadModule: "vesa" [ 3706.820] (II) UnloadSubModule: "int10" [ 3706.820] (II) Unloading int10 [ 3706.820] (II) UnloadSubModule: "vbe" [ 3706.820] (II) Unloading vbe [ 3706.820] (EE) Screen(s) found, but none have a usable configuration. [ 3706.820] (EE) Fatal server error: [ 3706.820] (EE) no screens found(EE) [ 3706.820] (EE) Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help. [ 3706.820] (EE) Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information. [ 3706.820] (EE) [ 3706.827] (EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file. I also saved the dsmeg output to see if it can be of any help. In order to be able to get to this stage I had to boot with nomodeset option and removed quiet and splash. Anyone got this same error? Any guidance? I've tried other linux distros and so far the only one that is able to boot is Opensuse 12.3 without any issues (but only when I switch to legacy mode instead of UEFI).

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• Windows Phone Developer Spotlight: Nikolai Joukov

  - by Lori Lalonde

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/lorilalonde/archive/2014/06/04/windows-phone-developer-spotlight-nikolai-joukov.aspxAs part of an ongoing series, I plan to include a spotlight post on people within the community that are stars in their field and area of expertise. For my first spotlight post, I interviewed Nikolai Joukov, who is a regular attendee at my local area .NET User Group (CTTDNUG), and has also participated in many of the Mobile and Cloud workshops we have hosted over the past few years. Nikolai stood out immediately, because of his passion for developing mobile apps, his interest in continuous learning, and his drive to publish quality apps that people will find useful and entertaining. Background: Nikolai immigrated to Canada in 1995, and has been working in IT since 1997. He moved on to become an independent contractor in 2005, and has worked at various large scale organizations over the course of his career, including BMO, Enbridge, Economical Insurance, Equitable Life, Manulife and Sun Life. Nikolai is an accomplished Windows Phone and Windows Store publisher, with 11 published Windows Phone apps, and 8 published Windows Store apps. He has almost 6000 downloads and favourable reviews. Q & A with Nikolai How many years have you been developing Windows Phone apps? 2 years When did you develop your very first Windows Phone app, and what was it about? Actually, the very first app I wrote was for the Microsoft “Smart Phone” back in 2004. This phone was given to me by Microsoft during the Developers Days Conference in Toronto. It was some kind of experimental model named Smart Phone, but you had to use VB 3 to develop the applications. Needless to say, this was not very successful at that time. My app was a Stock Trades Calculator. Very primitive, but it was working for me. The phone was heavy and the battery barely lasted 4 hours. Microsoft stopped supporting it few months later and the phone stopped working shortly after, but I still have it as a souvenir. For Windows Phone, my first app was “Trip Packing Assistant”. This is a simple trip packing check list that allows you to list items by category, set required quantity of items, and mark off the item in the list when it is packed. I designed it for me and my wife Galina, since we love to travel and this program helps manage our list for us. How did you get started in Windows Phone development? I have to say thanks to our .NET User Group for introducing me to Windows Phone development. I was intrigued and decided to give it a try. In October 2012 during a 2 day training event that ObjectSharp hosted in London, I met Bruce Johnson. On his advice, I registered for Developer Movement, and it is was a good push to actually complete the apps that I started. You have a great series of travel guide apps both for Windows Phone and Windows Store. Tell us about how you came up with the idea to develop those apps and what process you went through to put it all together. Like I said earlier, my wife and I love to travel. Before I created Trip Packing Assistant, every time we were planning to travel somewhere new, Galina would spend 3-4 weeks doing research. She would create a Word document with all of the information. We didn’t want to have to carry our laptop with us all the time, so we printed out the Word document she created, and would take it with us. After we returned from the trip, we would bring back tons of pictures and materials. Then our friends started to ask us about our materials before they planned their trips to the same places we had visited. So I decided to give it a try and started making apps for Windows Phone and for Windows 8. I hope these applications will help people who are planning to travel. So, all of the pictures used in the travel apps you created were actually taken by you during these amazing trips? Yes Do you have another Windows Store/Windows Phone project in development right now? If so, can you give us a hint at what it will be about? I want to stay with travel apps for now. But this time I will try to write an app for us (Galina and I). Usually we go on the trip, then I write the apps after we have all this beautiful pictures in our hands. We are planning a trip to Rome. This app will not have the pictures, but I want to add a map with points of interest and all information that can be useful for us. Then we will go on our trip and test it on location. As well I am planning to work on my existing apps to make them better. What learning resources would you recommend for other developers that want to get started in Window Store and Windows Phone development? I would start with dev.windowsphone.com to get all tools and samples, also links to training materials. I like MVA (Microsoft Virtual Academy). Their videos are really useful and it is free. Pluralsight is good too but it is not free and I do not have a subscription anymore. Our .NET User Group meetings give good insights too. I went to all meetings and full day training events. When you start to develop your app, you need to do research for specific questions that arise during development. The Developer Portal and Nokia Developer are good resources too. Wrap Up Thanks Nikolai for participating in my first Spotlight blog post! Shown below is Nikolai’s publisher page in the Windows Phone Store and his publisher page in the Windows Store. Simply click on it to be taken to there to check out his portfolio of apps. Be sure to download his apps and try them out! They are all free! Nikolai’s Windows Phone apps   Nikolai’s Windows Store Apps

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• Don't Miss the Primavera Track Call for Presentations

  - by Melissa Centurio Lopes

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} COLLABORATE 13 Do you have first-hand experience with Oracle Primavera that will benefit others in the Primavera community? Can your insights save another company from learning an expensive lesson? Do you have a success story to tell?  The COLLABORATE 13 – Primavera Track Call for Presentations is now open! April 7–11, 2013 in Denver, Colorado, is the premier event for Primavera and Unifier power-users to learn best practices from successful customers as well as hear details on the latest product functionality from the Primavera team. With over 50 sessions dedicated to Primavera products, users will also be able to learn about Primavera's complete product suite and network with other customers and partners within the Primavera community. Customers can also attend hundreds of sessions on Oracle's complete product suite. Share your Primavera success story by submitting a presentation proposal. Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, October 31, 2012. The Primavera presence has been growing at Collaborate year over year, with 50+ sessions and 400 customers in attendance last year – but we want this year’s track to be even bigger and better so please submit a session! Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;}

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• PASS: Election Changes for 2011

  - by Bill Graziano

  Last year after the election, the PASS Board created an Election Review Committee.  This group was charged with reviewing our election procedures and making suggestions to improve the process.  You can read about the formation of the group and review some of the intermediate work on the site – especially in the forums. I was one of the members of the group along with Joe Webb (Chair), Lori Edwards, Brian Kelley, Wendy Pastrick, Andy Warren and Allen White.  This group worked from October to April on our election process.  Along the way we: Interviewed interested parties including former NomCom members, Board candidates and anyone else that came forward. Held a session at the Summit to allow interested parties to discuss the issues Had numerous conference calls and worked through the various topics I can’t thank these people enough for the work they did.  They invested a tremendous number of hours thinking, talking and writing about our elections.  I’m proud to say I was a member of this group and thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone (even if I did finally get tired of all the calls.) The ERC delivered their recommendations to the PASS Board prior to our May Board meeting.  We reviewed those and made a few modifications.  I took their recommendations and rewrote them as procedures while incorporating those changes.  Their original recommendations as well as our final document are posted at the ERC documents page.  Please take a second and read them BEFORE we start the elections.  If you have any questions please post them in the forums on the ERC site. (My final document includes a change log at the end that I decided to leave in.  If you want to know which areas to pay special attention to that’s a good start.) Many of those recommendations were already posted in the forums or in the blogs of individual ERC members.  Hopefully nothing in the ERC document is too surprising. In this post I’m going to walk through some of the key changes and talk about what I remember from both ERC and Board discussions.  I’ll pay a little extra attention to things the Board changed from the ERC.  I’d also encourage any of the Board or ERC members to blog their thoughts on this. The Nominating Committee will continue to exist.  Personally, I was curious to see what the non-Board ERC members would think about the NomCom.  There was broad agreement that a group to vet candidates had value to the organization. The NomCom will be composed of five members.  Two will be Board members and three will be from the membership at large.  The only requirement for the three community members is that you’ve volunteered in some way (and volunteering is defined very broadly).  We expect potential at-large NomCom members to participate in a forum on the PASS site to answer questions from the other PASS members. We’re going to hold an election to determine the three community members.  It will be closer to voting for Summit sessions than voting for Board members.  That means there won’t be multiple dedicated emails.  If you’re at all paying attention it will be easy to participate.  Personally I wanted it easy for those that cared to participate but not overwhelm those that didn’t care.  I think this strikes a good balance. There’s also a clause that in order to be considered a winner in this NomCom election, you must receive 10 votes.  This is something I suggested.  I have no idea how popular the NomCom election is going to be.  I just wanted a fallback that if no one participated and some random person got in with one or two votes.  Any open slots will be filled by the NomCom chair (usually the PASS Immediate Past President).  My assumption is that they would probably take the next highest vote getters unless they were throwing flames in the forums or clearly unqualified.  As a final check, the Board still approves the final NomCom. The NomCom is going to rank candidates instead of rating them.  This has interesting implications.  This was championed by another ERC member and I’m hoping they write something about it.  This will really force the NomCom to make decisions between candidates.  You can’t just rate everyone a 3 and be done with it.  It may also make candidates appear further apart than they actually are.  I’m looking forward talking with the NomCom after this election and getting their feedback on this. The PASS Board added an option to remove a candidate with a unanimous vote of the NomCom.  This was primarily put in place to handle people that lied on their application or had a criminal background or some other unusual situation and we figured it out. We list an explicit goal of three candidate per open slot. We also wanted an easy way to find the NomCom candidate rankings from the ballot.  Hopefully this will satisfy those that want a broad candidate pool and those that want the NomCom to identify the most qualified candidates. The primary spokesperson for the NomCom is the committee chair.  After the issues around the election last year we didn’t have a good communication plan in place.  We should have and that was a failure on the part of the Board.  If there is criticism of the election this year I hope that falls squarely on the Board.  The community members of the NomCom shouldn’t be fielding complaints over the election process.  That said, the NomCom is ranking candidates and we are forcing them to rank some lower than others.  I’m sure you’ll each find someone that you think should have been ranked differently.  I also want to highlight one other change to the process that we started last year and isn’t included in these documents.  I think the candidate forums on the PASS site were tremendously helpful last year in helping people to find out more about candidates.  That gives our members a way to ask hard questions of the candidates and publicly see their answers. This year we have two important groups to fill.  The first is the NomCom.  We need three people from our membership to step up and fill this role.  It won’t be easy.  You will have to make subjective rankings of your fellow community members.  Your actions will be important in deciding who the future leaders of PASS will be.  There’s a 50/50 chance that one of the people you interview will be the President of PASS someday.  This is not a responsibility to be taken lightly. The second is the slate of candidates.  If you’ve ever thought about running for the Board this is the year.  We’ve never had nine candidates on the ballot before.  Your chance of making it through the NomCom are higher than in any previous year.  Unfortunately the more of you that run, the more of you that will lose in the election.  And hopefully that competition will mean more community involvement and better Board members for PASS. Is this the end of changes to the election process?  It isn’t.  Every year that I’ve been on the Board the election process has changed.  Some years there have been small changes and some years there have been large changes.  After this election we’ll look at how the process worked and decide what steps to take – just like we do every year.

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• Moving users folder on Windows-7 to another partition - bad idea?

  - by Donat

  Hi, I'd like to re-submit here a question posted by Benjol on Aug 17at 5:57 "Moving users folder on Windows Vista to another partition - bad idea?" (I can't post one than one link until I earn "10 reputation" and removed my "answer" there to post my follow-up questions here). I am anxiously getting ready at long last to to carry out a clean install (using custom install option) from Vista to Windows-7 Home Premium 64bit with the free upgrade I received late October. For my Vista system I successfully set-up last Summer a multi-partitions scheme with Users and Program Data on a a different partition than the operating system (see link below, and its subsequent links in my comment for details). http://tuts4tech.net/2009/08/05/windows-7-move-the-users-and-program-files-directories-to-a-different-partition/comment-page-1/#comment-562 I was planning a similar set-up for windows 7, a little more streamlined, with OS, Program Files on C:, Users and Program Data on D:, and TV media recording on a separate partition. Reading the Question submitted by Benjol, I am second guessing too. Is moving Users and Program Data on a different partition than the default primary partition with OS and Program Files such a good idea? The couple of people I talked to at the official Microsoft Windows 7 booth at CES 2010 gave the same answer to the intention of moving the Users profile folder to another partition. In a nutshell, they all told me that they used to do this in XP and less in Vista but not anymore with Windows 7... "It is stable, after two months still no problem" I had the feeling it was a scripted answer to emphasize how Windows 7 is so stable and efficient... (Will Windows-7 system not become bugged down over the course of several months to a year or two? Only time will tell) Long story short, I share the same view than Benjol expressed with respect to being "able to backup and restore system and user data independently." I just received a 2TB usb2, eSATA external hard drive as a back-up drive, which includes NTI Shadow 4 (4.1.0.150) for back-up solution. I took note of the issue with NTUSER.DAT and I will read more about Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Windows 7. I am willing to put the effort if placing Users and Program Data on a different partition would allow to restore a fresher OS+Program image when the system gets bugged down. Questions: Is it such a bad idea? What is the "easy route" referred by Benjol in his post? Is it to just relocate folders to another partition using the Folder property tool? (It is not practical for several users and might not provide a straightforward restore process of just OS and Program Files when needed.) I am starting to learn about Windows 7 libraries. Would Windows 7 libraries be another alternative to achieve this? All this reading to decide how to organize the partition scheme for my custom system is starting to be confusing. I apologize for this lengthy Question. It is my first day here on SuperUser and I am just learning how different from a discussion thread it is. Thank you in advance for all your suggestions and comments. Donat

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• Instructions on how to configure a WebLogic Cluster and use it with Oracle Http Server

  - by Laurent Goldsztejn

  On October 17th I delivered a webcast on WebLogic Clustering that included a demo with Apache as the proxy server.  I realized that many steps are needed to set up the configuration I used during the demo.  The purpose of this article is to go through these steps to show how quickly and easily one can define a new cluster and then proxy requests via an Oracle Http Server (OHS). The domain configuration wizard offers the option to create a cluster.  The administration console or WLST, the Weblogic scripting tool can also be used to define a new cluster.  It can be created at any time but the servers that will participate in it cannot be in a running state. Cluster Creation using the configuration wizard Network and architecture requirements need to be considered while choosing between unicast and multicast. Multicast Vs. Unicast with WebLogic Clustering is of great help to make the best decision between the two messaging modes.  In addition, Configure Cluster offers details on each single field displayed above. After this initial configuration page, individual servers could be assigned to this newly created cluster although servers can be added later to the cluster.  What is not recommended is for the Admin server to participate in a cluster as the main purpose of the Admin server is to perform the bulk of the processing for the domain.  Servers need to stop before being assigned to a cluster.  There is also no minimum number of servers that have to participate in the cluster. At this point the configuration should be done and the cluster created successfully.  This can easily be verified from the console. Each clustered managed server can be launched to join the cluster.   At startup the following messages should be logged for each clustered managed server: <Notice> <WeblogicServer> <BEA-000365> <Server state changed to STARTING> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000197> <Listening for announcements from cluster using messaging_mode cluster messaging> <Notice> <Cluster> <BEA-000133> <Waiting to synchronize with other running members of cluster_name>  It's time to try sending requests to the cluster and we will do this with the help of Oracle Http Server to play the role of a proxy server to demonstrate load balancing.  Proxy Server configuration  The first step is to download Weblogic Server Web Server Plugin that will enhance the web server by handling requests aimed at being sent to the Weblogic cluster.  For our test Oracle Http Server (OHS) will be used.  However plug-ins are also available for Apache Http server, Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Oracle iPlanet Webserver or even WebLogic Server with the HttpClusterServlet. Once OHS is installed on the system, the configuration file, mod_wl_ohs.conf, will need to be altered to include Weblogic proxy specifics. First of all, add the following directive to instruct Apache to load the Weblogic shared object module extracted from the plugins file just downloaded. LoadModule weblogic_module modules/mod_wl_ohs.so and then create an IfModule directive to encapsulate the following location block so that proxy will be enabled by path (each request including /wls will be directed directly to the WebLogic Cluster).  You could also proxy requests by MIME type using MatchExpression in the Location block. <IfModule weblogic_module> <Location /wls>    SetHandler weblogic-handler    PathTrim /wls    WebLogicCluster MS1_URL:port,MS2_URL:port    Debug ON    WLLogFile        c:/tmp/global_proxy.log     WLTempDir        "c:/myTemp"    DebugConfigInfo  On </Location> </IfModule> SetHandler specifies the handler for the plug-in module  PathTrim will instruct the plug-in to trim /w ls from the URL before forwarding the request to the cluster. The list of WebLogic Servers defined in WeblogicCluster could contain a mixed set of clustered and single servers.  However, the dynamic list returned for this parameter will only contain valid clustered servers and may contain more servers if not all clustered servers are listed in WeblogicCluster. Testing proxy and load balancing It's time to start OHS web server which should at this point be configured correctly to proxy requests to the clustered servers.  By default round-robin is the load balancing strategy set by WebLogic. Testing the load balancing can be easily done by disabling cookies on your browser given that a request containing a cookie attempts to connect to the primary server. If that attempt fails, the plug-in attempts to make a connection to the next available server in the list in a round-robin fashion.  With cookies enabled, you could use two different browsers to test the load balancing with a JSP page that contains the following: <%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" language="java"  %>  <%  String path = request.getContextPath();   String getProtocol=request.getScheme();   String getDomain=request.getServerName();   String getPort=Integer.toString(request.getLocalPort());   String getPath = getProtocol+"://"+getDomain+":"+getPort+path+"/"; %> <html> <body> Receiving Server <%=getPath%> </body> </html>  Assuming that you name the JSP page Test.jsp and the webapp that contains it TestApp, your browsers should open the following URL: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp  Each browser should connect to a different clustered server and this simple JSP should confirm that.  The webapp that contains the JSP needs to be deployed to the cluster. You can also verify that the load is correctly balanced by looking at the proxy log file.  Each request generates a set of log entries that starts with : timestamp ================New Request: Each request is associated with a primary server and a secondary server if one is available.  For our test request, the following entries should appear in the log as well:Using Uri /wls/TestApp/Test.jsp After trimming path: '/TestApp/Test.jsp' The final request string is '/TestApp/Test.jsp' If an exception occurs, it should also be logged in the proxy log file with the prefix:timestamp *******Exception type   WeblogicBridgeConfig DebugConfigInfo enables runtime statistics and the production of configuration information.  For security purposes, this parameter should be turned off in production. http://webserver_host:port/path/xyz.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig will display a proxy bridge page detailing the plugin configuration followed by runtime statistics which could help in diagnosing issues along with the analyzing of the proxy log file.  In our example the url would be: http://localhost/wls/TestApp/Test.jsp?__WebLogicBridgeConfig  Here is how the top section of the screen can look like: The bottom part of the page contains runtime statistics, here is a snippet of it (unrelated with the previous JSP example).   This entire plugin configuration should be very similar with other web servers, what varies is the name of the proxy server configuration file. So, as you can see, it only takes a few minutes to configure a Weblogic cluster and get servers to join it. 

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• Communities - The importance of exchange and discussion

  Communication with your environment is an essential part of everyone's life. And it doesn't matter whether you are actually living in a rural area in the middle of nowhere, within the pulsating heart of a big city, or in my case on a wonderful island in the Indian Ocean. The ability to exchange your thoughts, your experience and your worries with another person helps you to get different points of view and new ideas on how to resolve an issue you might be confronted with. Benefits of community work What happens to be common sense in your daily life, also applies to your work environment. Working in IT, or ICT as it is called in Mauritius, requires a lot of reading and learning. Not only during your lectures at the university but with your colleagues in a project assignment and hopefully with 'unknown' pals in the universe of online communities. At least I can say that I learned quite a lot from other developers code, their responses in various forums, their numerous blog articles, and while attending local user group meetings. When I started to work as a professional software developer (or engineer some may say) years ago I immediately checked the existence of communities on the programming language, the database technology and other vital information on software development in general. Luckily, it wasn't too difficult to find. My employer had a subscription of the monthly magazines and newsletters of a national organisation which also run the biggest forum in that area. Getting in touch with other developers and reading their common problems but also solutions was a huge benefit to my growth. Image courtesy of Michael Kappel (CC BY-NC 2.0) Active participation and regular contribution to this community gave me some nice advantages, too. Within three years I was listed as a conference speaker at the annual developer's conference and provided several sessions on different topics during consecutive years. Back in 2004, I took over the responsibility and management of the monthly meetings of a regional user group, and organised it for more than two years. Furthermore, I was invited to the newly-founded community program of Microsoft Germany (Community Leader/Insider Program - CLIP). My website on Active FoxPro Pages was nominated in the second batch of online communities. Due to my community work and providing advice to others, I had the honour to be awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) - Visual Developer for Visual FoxPro in the years 2006 and 2007. It was a great experience to meet with other like-minded people and I'm really grateful for that. Just in case, more details are listed in my Curriculum Vitae. But this all changed when I moved to Mauritius... Cyber island Mauritius? During the first months in Mauritius I was way too busy to think about community activities at all. First of all, there was the new company that had to be set up, the new staff had to be trained and of course the communication work-flows and so on with the project managers back in Germany had to be sorted out, too. Second, I had to get a grip of my private matters like getting the basics for my new household or exploring the neighbourhood, and last but not least I needed a break from the hectic and intensive work prior to my departure. As soon as the sea literally calmed down, I started to have conversations with my colleagues about communities and user groups. Sadly, it turned out that there were none, or at least no one was aware of any at that time. Oh oh, what did I do? Anyway, having this kind of background and very positive experience with off-line and on-line activities I decided for myself that some day I'm going to found a community in Mauritius for all kind of IT/ICT-related fields. The main focus might be on software development but not on a certain technology or methodology. It was clear to me that it should be an open infrastructure and anyone is welcome to join, to experience, to share and to contribute if they would like to. That was the idea at that time... Ok, fast-forward to recent events. At the end of October 2012 I was invited to an event called Open Days organised by Microsoft Indian Ocean Islands together with other local partners and resellers. There I got in touch with local Technical Evangelist Arnaud Meslier and we had a good conversation on communities during the breaks. Eventually, I left a good impression on him, as we are having chats on Facebook or Skype irregularly. Well, seeing that my personal and professional surroundings have been settled and running smooth, having that great exchange and contact with Microsoft IOI (again), and being really eager to re-animate my intentions from 2007, I recently founded a new community: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community - #MSCC It took me a while to settle down with the name but it was obvious that the community should not be attached to one single technology, like ie. .NET user group, Oracle developers, or Joomla friends (these are fictitious names). There are several other reasons why I came up with 'Craftsmanship' as the core topic of this community. The expression of 'engineering' didn't feel right with the fields covered. Software development in all kind of facets is a craft, and therefore demands a lot of practice but also guidance from more experienced developers. It also includes the process of designing, modelling and drafting the ideas. Has to deal with various types of tests and test methodologies, and of course should be focused on flexible and agile ways of acting. In order to meet and to excel a customer's request for a solution. Next, I was looking for an easy way to handle the organisation of events and meeting appointments. Using all kind of social media platforms like Google+, LinkedIn, Facebook, Xing, etc. I was never really confident about their features of event handling. More by chance I stumbled upon Meetup.com and in combination with the other entities (G+ Communities, FB Pages or in Groups) I am looking forward to advertise and manage all future activities here: Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community This is a community for those who care and are proud of what they do. For those developers, regardless how experienced they are, who want to improve and master their craft. This is a community for those who believe that being average is just not good enough. I know, there are not many 'craftsmen' yet but it's a start... Let's see how it looks like by the end of the year. There are free smartphone apps for Android and iOS from Meetup.com that allow you to keep track of meetings and to stay informed on latest updates. And last but not least, there will be a Trello workspace to collect and share ideas and provide downloads of slides, etc. Sharing is caring! As mentioned, the #MSCC is present in various social media networks in order to cover as many people as possible here in Mauritius. Following is an overview of the current networks: Twitter - Latest updates and quickies Google+ - Community channel Facebook - Community Page LinkedIn - Community Group Trello - Collaboration workspace to share and develop ideas Hopefully, this covers the majority of computer-related people in Mauritius. Please spread the word about the #MSCC between your colleagues, your friends and other interested 'geeks'. Your future looks bright Running and participating in a user group or any kind of community usually provides quite a number of advantages for anyone. On the one side it is very joyful for me to organise appointments and get in touch with people that might be interested to present a little demo of their projects or their recent problems they had to tackle down, and on the other side there are lots of companies that have various support programs or sponsorships especially tailored for user groups. At the moment, I already have a couple of gimmicks that I would like to hand out in small contests or raffles during one of the upcoming meetings, and as said, companies provide all kind of goodies, books free of charge, or sometimes even licenses for communities. Meeting other software developers or IT guys also opens up your point of view on the local market and there might be interesting projects or job offers available, too. A community like the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community is great for freelancers, self-employed, students and of course employees. Meetings will be organised on a regular basis, and I'm open to all kind of suggestions from you. Please leave a comment here in blog or join the conversations in the above mentioned social networks. Let's get this community up and running, my fellow Mauritians!

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• Oracle SOA Suite - Highlighted Travel and Transportation Customer References

  - by Bruce Tierney

  0 0 1 1137 6483 - 54 15 7605 14.0 Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-font-family:Cambria; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Cambria; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Next in this series on industry-specific highlights of Oracle SOA Suite customers is the Travel and Transportation industry.  If you are in the travel or transportation industry, take a look at how these Oracle SOA Suite integration customers have addressed common business requirements to enable better customer service, lower costs, and deliver new business services. For example, All Nippon Airways (ANA) has significantly lowered management costs associated with their hybrid on-premise/cloud ticketing system deployments for domestic and international flights. Their lead-time for changes or new applications has been greatly reduced compared to their old mainframe-based systems, enabling ANA to rapidly develop new services in response to changing market needs. Another example is Schneider National, a leading provider of truckload logistics, and how they have integrated Oracle E-Business Suite, Siebel CRM, Oracle Transportation Management and customers applications using Oracle SOA Suite. Schneider National has 400 BPEL processes that generate over 60 million composite instances over five SOA clusters.  Take a deeper look into any of these case studies, videos, and Oracle Magazine articles that closely align with your industry:  Customers fly and airline succeeds with an IT transformation. Company:  All Nippon Airways  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on January 06, 2014 Any successful business must ensure ongoing customer satisfaction, respond to increased competition, and minimize costs. Running a successful airline in today’s economic climate requires all of those things, as well a... Openmatics Revolutionizes Fleet Management with Standards-Based Vehicle Telematics Platform New Company:  Openmatics s.r.o.  Customer Snapshot   |   Automotive   |   Published on May 20, 2014 Openmatics uses Oracle WebCenter Portal and Oracle Application Development Framework as a foundation for Openmatics, a vehicle telematics service for next-generation fleet management. It integrated its own app shop wi... Future Proof: To keep pace with mobile, social, and location-based services, smart technologists are using middleware to innovate Company:  SFpark  Customer Oracle or Profit Magazine Article   |   Professional Services   |   Published on August 01, 2012 Oracle Fusion Middleware is at the heart of a recently completed and very ambitious project to change how people handle the challenge of finding a parking space in San Francisco, California. “Parking is a universal is... Globalia Corporación Empresarial Accelerates Hotel Bookings, Boosts Sales by 40% with In-Memory Data Grid Solution Company:  Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 29, 2013 Globalia Corporación Empresarial S.A. deployed Oracle Coherence to reengineer the group’s core system for hotel bookings, now serving booking requests involving 80 hotels within an average response time of 100 millise... Choice Hotels Uses Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite to Modernize Global IT Architecture Company:  Choice Hotels  Press Release   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on August 07, 2012 Choice Hotels International, one of the largest and most successful hotel franchises in the world, has implemented Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle BPM Suite. Sascar Consolidates Fleet Management Infrastructure and Accelerates Customers’ Data Access Company:  Sascar  Customer Case Study   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 07, 2014 Description – Sascar used Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud and Oracle WebLogic Suite 11g to consolidate fleet management and perform real-time vehicle tracking 4x faster. Directorate General of Civil Aviation Streamlines Key Aviation Applications Access, Improves Productivity and Reduces Maintenance Costs Company:  Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC)  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on May 24, 2013 With Oracle Fusion Middleware, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC) provided its 12,500 employees a virtual office environment that integrates team workspaces, business applications, and e-mails within a n... Schneider National Implements Next-Generation IT Infrastructure to Continue Leadership in Transportation and Logistics Industry Company:  Schneider National, Inc.  Customer Snapshot   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on February 26, 2013 Schneider National, Inc. deployed Oracle applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and Oracle development tools as the foundation for its next-generation IT environment, which is driving new levels of efficiency, profit... DGAC Cuts Subscription Costs with Oracle Company:  DGAC  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on October 31, 2012 Using Oracle WebCenter Portal, Oracle SOA Suite, and Oracle Exalogic, DGAC reduces the cost of subscriptions to newsletters and provide to its 12,500 employees a collaborative workspace portal. Asiana Airlines Builds PIP System with Oracle Solutions Company:  Asiana Airlines  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on July 26, 2012 With Oracle Exalogic and the Oracle SOA Suite, Asiana Airlines builds a passenger service integrated platform providing various services such as integration between its interface and internal systems and a data wareho... Choice Hotels Reduces Time to Market with Oracle WebCenter Company:  Choice Hotels  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on April 11, 2014 Using Oracle WebCenter and Oracle SOA standardization, Choice Hotels consolidated multiple platforms, reduced IT dependency and realized tremendous benefits in total cost of ownership and faster time to market support... An Interview with Schneider National's Judy Lemke Company:  Schneider National  Video   |   Travel and Transportation   |   Published on December 17, 2013 Judy Lemke talks with Mark Sunday about the challenges Schneider National faced and how they overcame them through a companywide transformational change. For more details on these case studies, you can use this pre-filtered search on “Travel and Transportation” / “Middleware” / “Service Oriented Architecture” or browse on your own at www.oracle.com/customers

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• What would cause an .exe to vanish without a trace?

  - by Peter pete

  I have a few computers. One computer, at home, one day suddenly had its pgbouncer.exe vanish. The antivirus didn't have it in its virus chest [avast]. I couldn't find the bgbouncer anywhere. All the other pgbouncer files remained where they used to be, except the exe had vanished. I hadn't uninstalled it, nor had anyone else used the machine. I hadn't installed any new software since the previous time I had used it either. Just now, however, my TV computer was running out of disk space, which was weird because I had python setup to do transcoding and archiving. I logged in and voila! python.exe had vanished !! Once again, Avast.exe didn't have it in its virus chest, and dunno! I do this time, with the TV computer, know exactly the date that python vanished. Sat the 18th my python scripts ran fine. Sat the 19th python was gone. I'm going to do some hunting in the event log to see what happened that day. But if anyone has experienced vanishings before and has a clue what happened, I would like to know. FYI: Both computers (bgbouncer vanish and python vanish) were running Win7 with the RDP hack and both on SSDs and both with Avast. Both computers had all windows updates set to manual(to prevent random stuff changing!) and neither had recently had any windows updates manually applied. FYI2: Tv computer had since the beginning of October dropbox running all the time trying to download two files. Sadly, a temporary download of each of these two files by dropbox resulted in Avast freaking out and virus-chesting them, and then dropbox downloading them partially again, before being dropboxed. Now, these two files were binaries from a program I had personally written and were clean on other machines. Since the python vanishing I have deleted these two binaries from dropbox (using the website) and dropbox exe on the tv computer is now at peace. I don't think this should cause python.exe to vanish though :/ New edit: On the 18/10/2013, at 0742 my python script ended with an error: "file still in use" which was unexpected but I shrugged it off since sometimes media portal doesn't release the recording. But on second thoughts is weird since the show in use would have been finished recording the day before. On the 18/10/2013 at 0807 the windows event log complains that several drivers required for CutePDF, send to onenote 2010, send to onenote 2013, microsoft xps document writer aren't installed. I just checked now and indeed those printers have vanished! New update! I found my python.exe that had been removed. It was still in the C:\Python33\ directory except it had been renamed to a random string charater.tmp (ie, it was made into a temp file) with a creation date of 19/10/2013 at 0600:02 am. Now, the computer normally wakes at 6am to do transcoding. What could have moved my python file into a tmp file?

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• NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC

  - by shiju

   In this post, I will give an introduction to how to work on NoSQL and document database with MongoDB , NoRM and ASP.Net MVC 2. NoSQL and Document Database The NoSQL movement is getting big attention in this year and people are widely talking about document databases and NoSQL along with web application scalability. According to Wikipedia, "NoSQL is a movement promoting a loosely defined class of non-relational data stores that break with a long history of relational databases. These data stores may not require fixed table schemas, usually avoid join operations and typically scale horizontally. Academics and papers typically refer to these databases as structured storage". Document databases are schema free so that you can focus on the problem domain and don't have to worry about updating the schema when your domain is evolving. This enables truly a domain driven development. One key pain point of relational database is the synchronization of database schema with your domain entities when your domain is evolving.There are lots of NoSQL implementations are available and both CouchDB and MongoDB got my attention. While evaluating both CouchDB and MongoDB, I found that CouchDB can’t perform dynamic queries and later I picked MongoDB over CouchDB. There are many .Net drivers available for MongoDB document database. MongoDB MongoDB is an open source, scalable, high-performance, schema-free, document-oriented database written in the C++ programming language. It has been developed since October 2007 by 10gen. MongoDB stores your data as binary JSON (BSON) format . MongoDB has been getting a lot of attention and you can see the some of the list of production deployments from here - http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Production+Deployments NoRM – C# driver for MongoDB NoRM is a C# driver for MongoDB with LINQ support. NoRM project is available on Github at http://github.com/atheken/NoRM. Demo with ASP.NET MVC I will show a simple demo with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC. To work with MongoDB and  NoRM, do the following steps Download the MongoDB databse For Windows 32 bit, download from http://downloads.mongodb.org/win32/mongodb-win32-i386-1.4.1.zip  and for Windows 64 bit, download  from http://downloads.mongodb.org/win32/mongodb-win32-x86_64-1.4.1.zip . The zip contains the mongod.exe for run the server and mongo.exe for the client Download the NorM driver for MongoDB at http://github.com/atheken/NoRM Create a directory call C:\data\db. This is the default location of MongoDB database. You can override the behavior. Run C:\Mongo\bin\mongod.exe. This will start the MongoDb server Now I am going to demonstrate how to program with MongoDb and NoRM in an ASP.NET MVC application.Let’s write a domain class public class Category {            [MongoIdentifier]public ObjectId Id { get; set; } [Required(ErrorMessage = "Name Required")][StringLength(25, ErrorMessage = "Must be less than 25 characters")]public string Name { get; set;}public string Description { get; set; }}  ObjectId is a NoRM type that represents a MongoDB ObjectId. NoRM will automatically update the Id becasue it is decorated by the MongoIdentifier attribute. The next step is to create a mongosession class. This will do the all interactions to the MongoDB. internal class MongoSession<TEntity> : IDisposable{    private readonly MongoQueryProvider provider;     public MongoSession()    {        this.provider = new MongoQueryProvider("Expense");    }     public IQueryable<TEntity> Queryable    {        get { return new MongoQuery<TEntity>(this.provider); }    }     public MongoQueryProvider Provider    {        get { return this.provider; }    }     public void Add<T>(T item) where T : class, new()    {        this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Insert(item);    }     public void Dispose()    {        this.provider.Server.Dispose();     }    public void Delete<T>(T item) where T : class, new()    {        this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Delete(item);    }     public void Drop<T>()    {        this.provider.DB.DropCollection(typeof(T).Name);    }     public void Save<T>(T item) where T : class,new()    {        this.provider.DB.GetCollection<T>().Save(item);                }  }    The MongoSession constrcutor will create an instance of MongoQueryProvider that supports the LINQ expression and also create a database with name "Expense". If database is exists, it will use existing database, otherwise it will create a new databse with name  "Expense". The Save method can be used for both Insert and Update operations. If the object is new one, it will create a new record and otherwise it will update the document with given ObjectId.  Let’s create ASP.NET MVC controller actions for CRUD operations for the domain class Category public class CategoryController : Controller{ //Index - Get the category listpublic ActionResult Index(){    using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        var categories = session.Queryable.AsEnumerable<Category>();        return View(categories);    }} //edit a single category[HttpGet]public ActionResult Edit(ObjectId id) {     using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        var category = session.Queryable              .Where(c => c.Id == id)              .FirstOrDefault();         return View("Save",category);    } }// GET: /Category/Create[HttpGet]public ActionResult Create(){    var category = new Category();    return View("Save", category);}//insert or update a category[HttpPost]public ActionResult Save(Category category){    if (!ModelState.IsValid)    {        return View("Save", category);    }    using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        session.Save(category);        return RedirectToAction("Index");    } }//Delete category[HttpPost]public ActionResult Delete(ObjectId Id){    using (var session = new MongoSession<Category>())    {        var category = session.Queryable              .Where(c => c.Id == Id)              .FirstOrDefault();        session.Delete(category);        var categories = session.Queryable.AsEnumerable<Category>();        return PartialView("CategoryList", categories);    } }        }  You can easily work on MongoDB with NoRM and can use with ASP.NET MVC applications. I have created a repository on CodePlex at http://mongomvc.codeplex.com and you can download the source code of the ASP.NET MVC application from here

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• What You Need to Know About Windows 8.1

  - by Chris Hoffman

  Windows 8.1 is available to everyone starting today, October 19. The latest version of Windows improves on Windows 8 in every way. It’s a big upgrade, whether you use the desktop or new touch-optimized interface. The latest version of Windows has been dubbed “an apology” by some — it’s definitely more at home on a desktop PC than Windows 8 was. However, it also offers a more fleshed out and mature tablet experience. How to Get Windows 8.1 For Windows 8 users, Windows 8.1 is completely free. It will be available as a download from the Windows Store — that’s the “Store” app in the Modern, tiled interface. Assuming upgrading to the final version will be just like upgrading to the preview version, you’ll likely see a “Get Windows 8.1″ pop-up that will take you to the Windows Store and guide you through the download process. You’ll also be able to download ISO images of Windows 8.1, so can perform a clean install to upgrade. On any new computer, you can just install Windows 8.1 without going through Windows 8. New computers will start to ship with Windows 8.1 and boxed copies of Windows 8 will be replaced by boxed copies of Windows 8.1. If you’re using Windows 7 or a previous version of Windows, the update won’t be free. Getting Windows 8.1 will cost you the same amount as a full copy of Windows 8 — $120 for the standard version. If you’re an average Windows 7 user, you’re likely better off waiting until you buy a new PC with Windows 8.1 included rather than spend this amount of money to upgrade. Improvements for Desktop Users Some have dubbed Windows 8.1 “an apology” from Microsoft, although you certainly won’t see Microsoft referring to it this way. Either way, Steven Sinofsky, who presided over Windows 8′s development, left the company shortly after Windows 8 was released. Coincidentally, Windows 8.1 contains many features that Steven Sinofsky and Microsoft refused to implement. Windows 8.1 offers the following big improvements for desktop users: Boot to Desktop: You can now log in directly to the desktop, skipping the tiled interface entirely. Disable Top-Left and Top-Right Hot Corners: The app switcher and charms bar won’t appear when you move your mouse to the top-left or top-right corners of the screen if you enable this option. No more intrusions into the desktop. The Start Button Returns: Windows 8.1 brings back an always-present Start button on the desktop taskbar, dramatically improving discoverability for new Windows 8 users and providing a bigger mouse target for remote desktops and virtual machines. Crucially, the Start menu isn’t back — clicking this button will open the full-screen Modern interface. Start menu replacements will continue to function on Windows 8.1, offering more traditional Start menus. Show All Apps By Default: Luckily, you can hide the Start screen and its tiles almost entirely. Windows 8.1 can be configured to show a full-screen list of all your installed apps when you click the Start button, with desktop apps prioritized. The only real difference is that the Start menu is now a full-screen interface. Shut Down or Restart From Start Button: You can now right-click the Start button to access Shut down, Restart, and other power options in just as many clicks as you could on Windows 7. Shared Start Screen and Desktop Backgrounds; Windows 8 limited you to just a few Steven Sinofsky-approved background images for your Start screen, but Windows 8.1 allows you to use your desktop background on the Start screen. This can make the transition between the Start screen and desktop much less jarring. The tiles or shortcuts appear to be floating above the desktop rather than off in their own separate universe. Unified Search: Unified search is back, so you can start typing and search your programs, settings, and files all at once — no more awkwardly clicking between different categories when trying to open a Control Panel screen or search for a file. These all add up to a big improvement when using Windows 8.1 on the desktop. Microsoft is being much more flexible — the Start menu is full screen, but Microsoft has relented on so many other things and you’d never have to see a tile if you didn’t want to. For more information, read our guide to optimizing Windows 8.1 for a desktop PC. These are just the improvements specifically for desktop users. Windows 8.1 includes other useful features for everyone, such as deep SkyDrive integration that allows you to store your files in the cloud without installing any additional sync programs. Improvements for Touch Users If you have a Windows 8 or Windows RT tablet or another touch-based device you use the interface formerly known as Metro on, you’ll see many other noticeable improvements. Windows 8′s new interface was half-baked when it launched, but it’s now much more capable and mature. App Updates: Windows 8′s included apps were extremely limited in many cases. For example, Internet Explorer 10 could only display ten tabs at a time and the Mail app was a barren experience devoid of features. In Windows 8.1, some apps — like Xbox Music — have been redesigned from scratch, Internet Explorer allows you to display a tab bar on-screen all the time, while apps like Mail have accumulated quite a few useful features. The Windows Store app has been entirely redesigned and is less awkward to browse. Snap Improvements: Windows 8′s Snap feature was a toy, allowing you to snap one app to a small sidebar at one side of your screen while another app consumed most of your screen. Windows 8.1 allows you to snap two apps side-by-side, seeing each app’s full interface at once. On larger displays, you can even snap three or four apps at once. Windows 8′s ability to use multiple apps at once on a tablet is compelling and unmatched by iPads and Android tablets. You can also snap two of the same apps side-by-side — to view two web pages at once, for example. More Comprehensive PC Settings: Windows 8.1 offers a more comprehensive PC settings app, allowing you to change most system settings in a touch-optimized interface. You shouldn’t have to use the desktop Control Panel on a tablet anymore — or at least not as often. Touch-Optimized File Browsing: Microsoft’s SkyDrive app allows you to browse files on your local PC, finally offering a built-in, touch-optimized way to manage files without using the desktop. Help & Tips: Windows 8.1 includes a Help+Tips app that will help guide new users through its new interface, something Microsoft stubbornly refused to add during development. There’s still no “Modern” version of Microsoft Office apps (aside from OneNote), so you’ll still have to head to use desktop Office apps on tablets. It’s not perfect, but the Modern interface doesn’t feel anywhere near as immature anymore. Read our in-depth look at the ways Microsoft’s Modern interface, formerly known as Metro, is improved in Windows 8.1 for more information. In summary, Windows 8.1 is what Windows 8 should have been. All of these improvements are on top of the many great desktop features, security improvements, and all-around battery life and performance optimizations that appeared in Windows 8. If you’re still using Windows 7 and are happy with it, there’s probably no reason to race out and buy a copy of Windows 8.1 at the rather high price of $120. But, if you’re using Windows 8, it’s a big upgrade no matter what you’re doing. If you buy a new PC and it comes with Windows 8.1, you’re getting a much more flexible and comfortable experience. If you’re holding off on buying a new computer because you don’t want Windows 8, give Windows 8.1 a try — yes, it’s different, but Microsoft has compromised on the desktop while making a lot of improvements to the new interface. You just might find that Windows 8.1 is now a worthwhile upgrade, even if you only want to use the desktop.     

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• MySQL Connect: What to Expect From the Wondrous Land of MySQL Cluster

  - by Mat Keep

  The MySQL Connect conference is only a couple of weeks away, with MySQL engineers, support teams, consultants and community aces busy putting the final touches to their talks. There will be many exciting new announcements and sharing of best practices at the conference, covering the range of MySQL technologies. MySQL Cluster will a big part of this, so I wanted to share some key sessions for those of you who plan on attending, as well as some resources for those who are not lucky enough to be able to make the trip, but who can't afford to miss the key news. Of course, this is no substitute to actually being there….and the good news is that registration is still open ;-) Roadmap: Whats New in MySQL Cluster Saturday 29th, 1300-1400, in Golden Gate room 5.                                                                                        Bernd Ocklin, director of MySQL Cluster development, and myself will be taking a look at what follows the latest MySQL Cluster 7.2 release. I don't want to give to much away - lets just say its not often you can add powerful new functionality to a product while at the same time making life radically simpler for its users. For those not making it to the Conference, a live webinar repeating the talk is scheduled for Thursday 25th October at 09.00 pacific time. Hold the date, registration will be open for that soon and published to our MySQL Webinars page Best Practices Getting Started with MySQL Cluster, Hands-On Lab Saturday 29th, 1600-1700, in Plaza Room A.                                                              Santo Leto, one of our lead MySQL Cluster support engineers, regularly works with users new to MySQL Cluster, assisting them in installation, configuration, scaling, etc. In this lab, Santo will share best-practices in getting started. Delivering Breakthrough Performance with MySQL Cluster Saturday 29th, 1730-1830, in Golden Gate room 5. Frazer Clement, lead MySQL Cluster software engineer, will demonstrate how to translate the awesome Cluster benchmarks (remember 1 BILLION UPDATEs per minute ?!) into real-world performance. You can also get some best practices from our new MySQL Cluster performance guide  MySQL Cluster BoF Saturday 29th, 1900-2000, room Golden Gate 5.                                                                                                           Come and get a demonstration of new tools for the installation and configuration of MySQL Cluster, and spend time with the engineering team discussing any questions or issues you may have. Developing High-Throughput Services with NoSQL APIs to InnoDB and MySQL Cluster Sunday 30th, 1145 - 1245, in Golden Gate room 7.   In this session, JD Duncan and Andrew Morgan will present how to get started with both Memcached and new NoSQL APIs. JD and I recently ran a webinar demonstrating how to build simple Twitter-like services with Memcached and MySQL Cluster. The replay is available for download.  Case Studies: MySQL Cluster @ El Chavo, Latin America’s #1 Facebook Game Sunday 30th, 1745 - 1845, in Golden Gate room 4.                             Playful Play deployed MySQL Cluster CGE to power their market leading social game. This session will discuss the challenges they faced, why they selected MySQL Cluster and their experiences to date. You can read more about Playful Play and MySQL Cluster here  A Journey into NoSQLand: MySQL’s NoSQL Implementation Sunday 30th, 1345 - 1445, in Golden Gate room 4.                                          Lig Turmelle, web DBA at Kaplan Professional and esteemed Oracle Ace, will discuss her experiences working with the NoSQL interfaces for both MySQL Cluster and InnoDB Evaluating MySQL HA Alternatives Saturday 29th, 1430-1530, room Golden Gate 5                                                                                   Henrik Ingo, former member of the MySQL sales engineering team, will provide an overview of various HA technologies for MySQL, starting with replication, progressing to InnoDB, Galera and MySQL Cluster What about the other stuff? Of course MySQL Connect has much, much more than MySQL Cluster. There will be lots on replication (which I'll blog about soon), MySQL 5.6, InnoDB, cloud, etc, etc. Take a look at the full Content Catalog to see more. If you are attending, I hope to see you at one of the Cluster sessions...and remember, registration is still open

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